Peninsula Sinking

  I have lived 5,512 days since that night and never has the moon set without my giving some reflection to it. And why have I counted the number of days? Because I almost died, I suppose. But, more than that, because when I woke up in the hospital I realized that not only did I almost die but if I had died it would not have made any difference to anything or anyone. I realized, then, that I was virtually alone in this heaving gasp of a cosmos. That I was helpless against the colossal indifference where space meets time and that not even soaring through the air, not even a bolt of lightning shuddering my teenage body could save me or heal me or make me into something that mattered. And maybe the electricity that scorched my flesh gave me my voice, my real voice. But it also kept that voice from breaking through.

  I reflect on this now from the treehouse, where I am waiting for Vanessa. I returned her gaze and nodded up to the treehouse and sauntered outside, looking over my shoulder to make sure she saw. The bright half moon and the cool night air blasted me into temporary sobriety. I climbed the steps slowly and walked into the treehouse, sensing through the darkness the empty cocktail glasses and the smell of wood and sweat. My fingers paused on the light switch for a moment, gently fondling the plastic nub. Then I decided no and left the lights out. I sat down on the hard wooden bench and listened to the echo of speeches sprawling into the courtyard and rising up through the floorboards. Now Theo is speaking and the laughter is coming fast and easy. He always was an articulate bastard. Should I feel bad for missing his speech? Maybe, but I feel more able to love him up here, just hearing the sound of his voice in the distance, unable to parse the words.

  Stop right now, thank you very much. The DJ is playing Spice Girls and Corrine’s friends are bobbing joyfully around the dance floor. They know all the words and all the choreography. I need somebody with the human touch. Sari Girl is gyrating in front of the Environmental Stud, dipping ludicrously close to the floor. The Environmental Stud is doing tight Travolta arm-circles. A handsome man with a close-trimmed beard is dancing with Vanessa, who is getting shattered in a hurry. She never came to me in the treehouse and now I’m wondering if she really looked at me across the dining room. Could Corrine have made up the whole “bangable” thing?

  The only answer to such questions is hard liquor so Drew and I lean on the bar, doing Malt Whitmans, doing JD Salingers, doing Gertrude Steins. Before long Drew goes full bellige, yelling that he is the mayor of the wedding, yelling that he is MC Hammered. Theo comes by and we tell him he’d better talk to the DJ and he says we might want to slow down because it’s just past nine. I make the responsible choice and ask the barkeep for two Caesars and he hands me two waters and says “trust me.” The Spice Girls fade into Backstreet Boys and somehow Drew and me are on the dance floor, doing the zombie dance and screaming out the words to “Backstreet’s Back.” Vanessa approaches and leans in to say something and her lips brush against my neck and I laugh, pretending I can hear her, then grab her arm as Queen comes on. Then it’s Bowie then Madonna then “Little Red Corvette” and then I have to go to the bathroom and when I come outside Vanessa lifts up her dress and flashes me her butt and it is genuinely not bad, even though she is wearing a total stepmom thong. She pulls me outside and we fall, giggling, into some bushes and as far as I can tell we are actually having sex but I’m too wasted to feel much and then Drew and Ricky Dingle come outside and apparently they don’t see us because they light cigarettes like ten feet away so we stop having numb sex and just lie there, giggling. Someone shines an iPhone flashlight on us and then Vanessa’s up and running away and I don’t know if I should follow her but I’m getting a gnarly case of the spins lying here in the soil looking up at the stars.

  That angelic asshole Dingle helps me up and drags me inside and gets me a bottle of water. I slouch at the table, trying to stitch my consciousness together one sense at a time, struggling against the spinning lights on the dance floor. I check my phone and see three texts from my dad, the last of which reads “Drinkypoos?” I put my phone away without responding, wondering whether I’m really going to fly home tomorrow afternoon without seeing my father at all and whether that is a time issue or some seriously twisted attempt at revenge.

  The music switches to a slow song which means blaring lightshow torture melts into disco ball swirl. Corrine dances with her father and Theo comes and sits down with me and asks how I’m doing and do I need something. I say fine and yes I need someone to love me unconditionally for the rest of my life. He laughs and says I should consider getting a dog and then somehow produces a slice of wedding cake and a lukewarm coffee and I mouw the cake and sip the coffee and say actually a dog is not a bad idea.

  He makes small talk until the food and coffee sobers me up and then asks if I’ve ever considered leaving town, says that for a lot of people leaving home is the only way to find their path. I tell him maybe I don’t want the same success he does. Maybe I’m happy just to work my day job and write my poems and hang out with Drew and the rest of the boys in Halifax because I can’t imagine better friends or a better place. He nods and smiles and seems to not quite believe me and in fact I’m not sure how much I believe myself. Of course I know that my friends who’ve left the province all have careers or partners or exotic travel stories and I have none of these things. Of course I know that on some level this place is like a succubus. A leech feeding, almost imperceptibly, on the future.

  “You know I love Halifax as much as you do,” he says eventually.

  “Yeah, well, it’s easier to love something from a distance.”

  “You think it’s easy?” Theo barks. “You think I wanted to leave? No. I miss you and I miss my mother and I think of the ocean every night as I fall asleep. I have a deep respect for your choice to stay. But I was stagnating there, and at some point I had to grow up. I don’t know if it’s that peninsula or that city or just our particular group of privileged Haligonians but I know that our friends who stay home are stagnating. Treading water on a sinking peninsula. But I also know I love that sinking peninsula more than anything else. That that is the tension that I live in every day. The tension that I am.”

  I nod and say I think I know what he means. I do not say that I am living the other side of that tension, always wondering what it might mean to move to Toronto and take my father’s offer of the Newmarket basement until I get settled. I do not say about living one’s whole life keeping one eye trained on the metropole, do not mention what he already knows: that my Nova Scotian father left me and my Nova Scotian mother for Ontario when I was ten years old and how it feels like acid searing flesh that my now-rich father clearly thinks this is the best decision he ever made. I do not say that that is a version of the tension shaping basically all young Nova Scotians I know: to leave and thrive or stay and suffer. Suffer economically but maybe not spiritually. Suffer and feel in the place you want to be.

  We sit there for a while in silence, watching Corrine slow dance with one of her uncles. After a while Theo blurts that he’s sorry. He didn’t mean to let everything slip out like that but it’s just he’s a bit drunk and he worries about me and he wants to see me do well by myself and we’re almost thirty now and sometimes he gets a little emotional.

  I tell him I’m sorry too and maybe he’s right and he takes my hand and squeezes it. A server comes around and tops up my coffee and I sit there staring into the cup until Theo says it’s okay. I ask what’s okay and he says, “The whole history. You and Corrine. It’s in the past and it’s okay and I’m sorry about that too.” I’m thinking maybe it’s not effing okay for me and I didn’t ask for Theo’s infuriating forgiveness but I know he means well so I put my hand on his shoulder and say, “Thank you, thank you, let’s just forget about the rest of it. All that matters right now is that I am so happy for the two of you and she looks magnificent.”

  Theo hugs me and says thanks and then the DJ leaves for an interlude that Theo seems to know about because he gets up and goes to
stand by Corrine as Rob takes the stage and starts to play a horrendous acoustic version of “Purple Rain.” I nurse my coffee and listen to Rob’s falsetto and imagine the kinds of dog I could get and picture a new Gavin, one who exercises three times a week and writes poetry every morning and eats kale and quinoa and meets all kinds of wholesome women at the dog park, a Gavin who starts thinking of adult human females as women instead of strippers or dancers or girls. It turns out that miraculously enough there are more speeches and Drew of all people is giving a speech and when he says “Theo and Corrine, you guys are as close to my heart as my heart is to my body” I stand up and applaud uproariously and walk outside, thinking treehouse. Maybe I’ll find my dog in the treehouse.

  I pass the bathroom and there’s a crowd and some commotion and I gather that Vanessa’s in there and someone hisses “what did you do to her?” and I keep walking, thinking treehouse, thinking quinoa, definitely not thinking Corrine Lara Corrine Nancy and then outside in the courtyard on the way to the treehouse I see Nancy, see her alone for the first time tonight, and I know there is only one thing it could mean.

  Theo came to visit, but Nancy never did. I spent two more weeks in the Victoria General and then went through months of bedrest at home. The doctors said I was lucky to be alive. As if we aren’t all lucky to be alive. But me especially, I guess. I had come ridiculously close to death and it took more than a decade before I started to feel unrattled by that. My dad came down from Ontario for a week and as usual he had nothing to discuss except sampling variables and regional demographics. It just made it weird between him and my mother, who didn’t know what to do except ensure I took my medications and rubbed the right creams on the right places. It was probably stupid and strange but I always imagined that Nancy would show up for a visit. I really thought that the touch of her hands could heal the burns. I thought that Nancy could peel back the bandages and lay her palms on my chapped white flesh and make me pink and bright and clean, make me a child again.

  I wonder where she’s coming from but I don’t think too hard about it and as she tries to walk straight past me with a politely motherish smile I stand in front of her and say “Hello Nancy” in a tone that I hope means “Nancy you have to stop here and talk to me now because you’re the only person who can save me” and somehow it works and she stops. And then I’m wondering what I need to be saved from and it’s not quite the dive bar and it’s not quite the underemployed malaise of Nova Scotia because in some weird way I love both those things.

  Nancy is wearing a black dress with spaghetti straps and I’m looking at the brown curve of her shoulders, tanned from the hours reading thrillers in her yard. There are freckles all over them, a thousand tiny brown droplets melting into the butter of her skin. The backs of her arms are taut, firmed by hours of impeccable Phalakasana. But this is not about any of that. This is not about the fact that she has aged like a sunset. This is about salvation.

  I’m thinking maybe what I need to be saved from is that toxic shame in me, the shame that I can’t quite locate but is of course about more than stealing Blue Velvet back in the when. But as I peer into the creamy galaxies of Nancy’s shoulders and think about putting a hand on her sun-browned neck I realize there will be no forgiveness of this shame because the shame is me. It is the shame of coming from a colonial, sinking, backwater peninsula. The shame of being descended from a heinous mixture of the British and French settlers who stole that place from the Mi’kmaq and built cannons and burnt villages and then sold the whole package to Canada. But more than that the shame is the shame of everything I’ve ever done and felt and fucked and wanted and repressed. The shame is basic human depravity and it is howling, howling through me now.

  I’m thinking maybe I don’t need to be saved, just salved, and I’m saying “Nancy, Nancy I’m sorry” and she is laughing nervously and saying sorry for what and asking me where’s Vanessa and I’m saying “no no seriously I’m sorry.”

  Enter silence. Enter gravitas.

  The night peals into outer space and the courtyard becomes a vacuum.

  Nancy looks at me with genuine concern and I say, “I’m sorry about Blue Velvet. About your, well, sex toy, and everything.”

  Enter harrowing, harrowing moments.

  I am an astronaut drifting away from a spaceship and all the fuel expired.

  Nancy is not laughing now. “It’s okay, Gavin, it’s in the past. But thank you.”

  She moves to walk away but I reach out for her and she flinches and gives me an are-you-fucking-serious look and then actually says “are you fucking serious?” I say “I think I am fucking serious” and “I’ve always sort of loved you” and “save me.” Then I lean down to kiss her and she’s whispering not here, hissing let’s go up to the treehouse, but then she’s actually saying, “Gavin, don’t be ridiculous.” I try to kiss her again, thinking maybe if she just slapped me but she doesn’t just slap me, she backs away again and says “No” in a way that is unequivocal. She puts her hand on my shoulder and says, “Don’t be ridiculous. I can’t save you, Gavin. I will never be able to save you. I don’t know what’s wrong and I’m sure it’s hard but I will never be able to save you.” Nancy walks back inside and I am alone in the darkness.

  Floating, floating, in the darkness of the courtyard at the end of the known.

  I wait as long as I can, listening to the bass thud and the girls squealing “It’s my song!” every three minutes. Then I go inside to find Vanessa but the chorus of bridesmaids outside the ladies’ informs me that she’s still incapacitated and it’s still my fault and I’m thinking maybe it’s good that I didn’t have to fully deflate that particular balloon of my horny adolescent imaginary. Or maybe that fantasy is already looking like a well-trod condom strewn across a grungy sidewalk.

  I go to the bar and am surprised to find Drew neither there nor on the dancefloor. I don’t see Theo or Corrine either and the bartender tells me it’s last call so I get two beers and a bottle of water and walk away.

  Back in the courtyard I hear voices coming from the treehouse. I ascend the stairs and hear the sound of acoustic guitars. Drew and Theo are strumming fast power chords and they both send me huge grins as I walk in. They are playing The Misfits, playing GG Allin, the songs we used to play back in the when. And I’m thinking who cares that the DJ is playing Miley Cyrus and who cares that I sent twenty poems out last year and only one got published and who cares that I work at a dive bar with an undergrad degree in English and philosophy wilting in my back pocket and who cares that Vanessa is hugging a toilet and who cares that although Nancy says she forgives me for the Blue Velvet thing I will never feel forgiven for the shame that has made me? Who cares? I am here and I am alive. I am thinking maybe I will go to cooking school and start a catering company, perfect that walnut-mushroom burger, that artisanal ginger ketchup. I am thinking I will get a dog, put together a book of poetry, sign up for OkCupid because people my age don’t meet at the bar. I am thinking what I have known all along: that I will not move here, will not work for Samizdat, will not date Lara or schmooze Torontonian because I could never write properly about bike lanes and brunch lines and the trees that grow in condo gardens.

  I stumble out onto the porch and Theo and Drew and Corrine follow me. Theo has some cigars and we light them and then I put my arms around them all at once and we are alive, here, together. One Upper Canadian princess and three children of a stolen ocean standing in a tree, looking out through the branches at the city and the night sky, living. When I get home I will dive head-first into the cold water of the North Atlantic. I will feel the sand saturating the water as it kicks back from the surf. The sea will rub the sand against my body like softest pestle, grinding the mortar of me, and I will be happy and moving and tortured and alive. Because if this peninsula is going to sink, I am going to sink with it.

  Sink gentle, sink wild, sink triumphal.

  Sink weightless, weightless
in the womb-dark deep.

  SUTURE

  Imagine it’s you facing the loss of the still-ripening cherries between your legs. Imagine you’re the black-and-white splotched Jack Russel mix with a knuckle in your tail from getting run over by a mountain bike. Imagine you have no idea that a vet might soon be opening your scrotal sac and scraping out your testes and your vas deferens like a chef spooning seeds from a cantaloupe. Imagine you have to wear a cone on your head to keep you from licking your own stitched and scabby genital region. A cone to stop you from sniffing and tonguing the sore and pungent spots you desperately want to tongue and sniff. Because tonguing is how you treat your wounds, sniffing how you sculpt your world. Picture these humans you desperately adore, the male with the scars and the female with different coloured eyes. Conjure these companions who walk city streets stooping to collect your steaming excretions in winter chill, handling the warmth of your digested kibble through the coarse and rustling plastic of a poo bag. These people who nuzzle and spoon you, who snoog you softly in their beds at night. Who named you Ezra but mostly call you Chèvre and Bedrock and Nebuchadnezzra. Who cook chicken necks to mix with your food, placing those gizzards in a special Tupperware marked “dog chicken.” Microwaving that rangy poultry for fifteen seconds to take off the chill before mixing it with your grain-free kibble. These people who refuse to eat meat themselves but who care enough about your health and pleasure to bring chicken necks into their kitchen. Now imagine that these same people decide to remove your genitals. Because your dispatched testes mean an easier life for them. Mean not having to show face at the dog park and say “intact.” Because this way all your erotic drives can be channelled into puppy playdates and doggy daycares and vigorous Kong-tossing sessions. Imagine that these people who call themselves animal lovers want to reroute your sexuality, to sluice your eros—to make every light in you beam for them and them alone.